Google Speed Update Rolled out for All users Can Affect Page Ranking

Google Speed Update – Why Now?

User experience while browsing will make or break your marketing campaign, depending on how fast your website loads especially on mobile browsers. If page takes too long, user is going to leave the site and continue looking for other options. Google has been educating marketers to broadly think about performance of the website that affects user’s experience, regardless of the technology used, and to take action to make necessary improvements to the site.

As of 7/9/18, the “Google Speed Update” is rolled out for all users. This update will only affect the pages that are loading slow and delivering slowest experience to users. Note that the intent of the search query is still the high ranking signal and pages with relevant content may still rank higher even if they are loading slow.

Is my Page Affected by Google Speed Update?

Here are few resources to help you evaluate a page’s performance:

Chrome User Experience Report, a public dataset of key user experience metrics for popular destinations on the web, as experienced by Chrome users under real-world conditions

Lighthouse, an automated tool and a part of Chrome Developer Tools for auditing the quality (performance, accessibility, and more) of web pages

PageSpeed Insights, a tool that indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and suggests performance optimizations